"Edit with Emacs" Chrome extension

Alex Bennée has written an Edit with Emacs extension for Google Chrome. It's Chrome's answer to Firefox's "It's all text" extension, which makes composing emails, blog posts, and other long-form text in a browser a lot more tolerable. (Hooray!)

Since Chrome extensions can't spawn arbitrary processes, the Edit with Emacs extension requires the cooperation of an additional edit server that can. The edit server is implemented in elisp and is bundled with the extension.

The extension itself gives you some instructions for how to load the requisite code into your Emacs, but there's not much to it (save this, copy and paste that).

That's because a substantial part of the functionality of this extension is in the edit server (implemented in Elisp itself), which receives HTTP requests from Chrome and then pops open an Emacs frame for you. While I'm sure you could tweak that to instead spawn some other editor if you wished, it seems weird to have Emacs (or this extension) in the loop at all of you are going to go that route.

The Firefox analogue, It's All Text, has no such weirdness because Firefox extensions are directly able to spawn new processes. So from the extension's perspective, all external editors are basically equivalent.

> it seems weird to have Emacs (or this extension) in the loop at all of you are going to go that route.

Aha, so I see now that the extension author provides an alternative edit server implementation as a Python script. This one can spawn the editor of your choice, and would indeed allow you to use this extension without running Emacs: